Electronic distribution of financial product information from financial product originators to clients is a common service supplied by financial services providers. Typically, the service provider acts as a conduit for passing information related to various products between the financial content provider and clients. Such information includes new product offerings, updates to product attributes, such as a current price, and perhaps changes in the manner in which the product is classified.
It is not uncommon for a service provider to need to process dozens of data streams, each of which may be carrying information related to a large number of products. For example, a single data stream containing information about U.S. Treasuries typically contains data events related to several hundred different products.
There are various techniques for distributing raw financial services data to the clients. However, present techniques are labor or computationally expensive, treating the providers on an ad-hoc basis. In particular, in order to receive and process informational content so it can be distributed to downstream clients, the host needed to be hardwired to the specific structure and format of the incoming data stream. As a result, separate systems have developed for processing data from different sources. For example, one system may be dedicated to processing raw treasuries data and another independent system having its own structure may be dedicated to processing raw data related to corporate offerings. While acceptable for some operations, such ad-hoc techniques do not scale well and are difficult to integrate into a single comprehensive environment.
In addition, while present systems may be suitable for routing data from its source to various interested clients, conventional clients have been hard-wired to the host system with high-speed data connections. The proliferation of portable and wireless computer devices with low bandwidths and intermittent connectivity, along with the greater presence of smaller clients (both professional and individual) increases the need to provide a robust and adaptable data stream which is not susceptible to the inconsistencies inherent in communicating over a large communications network, such as the Internet.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide an integrated infrastructure product which is designed to process real-time content streams from a host system such that it can be distributed to authorized subscribers.
It is a further object to provide a system configured to process multiple streams of raw data in real time and providing a fonnatted and validated output which is suitable for down stream processing and distribution to clients.
Yet another object of the present invention is to provide a system which is flexible and easily adapted to permit the management of multiple streams of data from various sources and allow new streams and product types to be easily added or modified.
Yet a further object of the present invention is to provide validated and formatted offer data in a format which minimizes the amount of data required to transmit the offer to downstream services.
Yet another object of the present invention is to provide a data delivery mechanism which dynamically adjusts transmission rates to the speed at which a client can receive and process data while ensuring that updated data received by a client is current.